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Monday, February 06, 2012

What happened to the Eberron novels?

Although I'm always skeptical of D&D or other property tie-in novels, hope always springs eternal, and I'm always interested in following what's going on with D&D novels. Eberron, as a setting that hit several notes that I myself was interested in as a gamer and fantasy fan in general, was one that I liked better than most--certainly better than the endless tread of Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms novels, most of which I'm politely disinterested in.

However, I was just at Barnes & Noble recently (picked up two Arkham Horror novels--how's that for straying into new tie-in territory?) and was quite curious to note that there were absolutely no Eberron novels on the shelf anymore. There were a lot of Forgotten Realms ones. There were a lot of Dragonlance ones. There were a few D&D generic ones (the "points of light" setting.) There were a number of other books here and there based on other properties. Black Library and Star Wars had a lot of shelf space, unsurprisingly.

But Eberron was completely gone. MIA. No explanation that I can find.

Did the Eberron novel line get cancelled? I don't think a new Eberron novel has come out for quite a while. Has the setting been benched and put in mothballs?

Is anyone who knows anything about this likely to come across this blog post? (No.) Still, I ask it anyway. Of all the WotC novel lines, that was the one I was most interested in seeing, and the Eberron novels that I've read tended to be amongst the better D&D novels in general (not counting The Crimson Talisman. That book was pretty terrible.)

2 comments:

I noticed the same thing recently and the funny thing about it is that Eberron novels aren't the only thing. When you look at 4e as a whole there are life four or five Eberron books and the rest of it is all the forgotten realms stuff or points of light.

The sad thing is that Eberron is the most promising thing about D&D in a while in my honest opinion and it's an interesting setting that just go crapped on in the end. Moreover I think that 4e's play style kind of glosses over the flavor of any game. I mean I feel like the setting for 4e is so combat centric and very little of the actual setting is described, so it doesn't really feed the flavor side of things well.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."